So, I haven’t seen absolutely everything that won Golden Globes tonight, but I’ve seen a lot of them. And I am very, very happy for Claire Danes and the lovely folks behind Homeland, and very, very irritated by the victories for The Descendants, though George Clooney could have won a directing award for Ides of March, so things could be worse. But if you want to know why you should—or shouldn’t—check out the winners, or just need some water cooler talking points when you head back into the office on Tuesday, I gotcha:

TV Series, Drama: Homeland
Actor in a TV Series, Drama: Kelsey Grammar, Boss
Actress in a TV Series, Drama: Claire Danes, Homeland
TV Series, Comedy: Modern Family
Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for TV: Downton Abbey
Best Performance by an Actor in a Mini-Series or a Motion Picture Made for TV: Idris Elba, Luther
Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for TV: Peter Dinklage, Game of Thrones
Motion Picture, Drama: The Descendants
Actor In A Motion Picture, Drama: George Clooney, The Descendants
Supporting Actress In A Motion Picture: Octavia Spencer, The Help
Best Director: Martin Scorcese, Hugo

And seriously, watch Luther everybody.

I assume almost none of you have seen A Better Life, which is too bad. Chris Weitz’s remarkably tender, tense chronicle of a few of days in the life of Carlos Galindo, an undocumented immigrant who sees his fortunes rise with the chance to purchase a truck that would let him start his own landscaping business, only to see them crumble when it’s stolen, is one of my favorite movies of the year. And Demian Bichir, who some of you may know from Weeds, just landed a Screen Actors Guild nomination for his performance as Carlos. It’s a remarkable performance, to a certain extent the inverse, and maybe the superior, of Michael Fassbender’s turn in Shame. Brandon spends most of his time in a forced placidness, and when his facade breaks, it shatters. Carlos, by contrast, is astonishingly, painfully open. In him you see that the tremendous privilege of the ability to be generous, the shock of the betrayal of that generosity, and the struggle to raise a son in a different life without losing him entirely.

Chris and Demian were kind enough to sit down with me for half an hour last week to discuss A Better Life and the politics of immigration reform in the United States. Our conversation appears here:

We’ve talked about this a bit before, but Andy Serkis makes the case for why he should be eligible for acting awards — which I agree with, I just don’t know that we can nominate him alone:

There is no difference. Acting is acting. Performance capture is a technology, not a genre; it’s just another way of recording an actor’s performance. It’s very interesting being in two movies this year that are manifested completely differently but use the same process. The same visual effects company, Weta Digital, produced apes that look entirely real and a palette and a style that honors the source material of Tintin. What Steven was trying to do was to have the best of both worlds, where you can create the look and the feel and the sensibility of Herge [Tintin's cartoonist creator] but have emotionally truthful performances. The technology allows the actors to enter into those worlds…The technology has come to the point where we could shoot Gollum and the Hobbits in the same moment, as we did in Apes. In the original, I’d have to shoot against empty plates that were shot on the day, then repeat the process on the performance-capture stage, sometimes months later. Now we get it in one hit, so it’s much more actor- and director-friendly.

Obviously post-production and effects work exist on a continuum. But there’s a difference between technological alteration without which a performance could not exist, and post-production work that tweaks or modifies a performance or a set but that does not constitute the core of the work. Our current awards categories don’t provide appropriate recognition to the first category of technological and post-production work. I want Serkis to get piles of statues. I just think we have to find a way to acknowledge the interactive nature of the work. The fact that visual effects artists often don’t get properly credited is part and parcel of a system that involves visual effects studios giving up not just credit but profits in order to keep work, even though the industry increasingly relies on their work to satisfy audience expectations.

Maybe if Serkis gets a nomination or an award for a role where his face isn’t actually on-screen, it could trigger a special citation for the visual effects folks who translated his performance. I don’t know that it’s a perfect solution. But I think we need to reconsider the awards categories themselves, not just who fits into them.

There’s something satisfying about having the Critics’ Choice Television Awards nominations come out the morning after the MTV Awards. I appreciate anything that gives Emma Stone and Ellen Page much-deserved love, but it’s always sort of amusing to see the generational clash between one voting pool that rates The Twilight Saga: Eclipse as the best movie of the year and another that’s determinedly beating the drum for very different kinds of art.

Of the best dramas on the Critics’ list, two are about charismatic criminals (Boardwalk Empire, Dexter), four are about highly unusual law enforcement officers or law enforcement officers in highly unusual situations up to and including zombie apocalypse (Fringe, Justified, The Killing, and The Walking Dead), one’s about a cheating politician’s wife (The Good Wife), one’s a skeptical look at coastal cultural elites (Mad Men), and another’s an anthem to middle-American values (Friday Night Lights). Moral complexity’s a good thing, particularly when it lets critics beat themselves up a little bit and mythologize the core audiences for the shows they write about.

In comedies, quirk rules too. Having NBC’s Thursday comedy block shows competing against each other is no big surprise. Actually, none of the nominations feel particularly shocking, from industry-favorite Louie, to crowd-pleaser Glee. It would actually be interesting to have a smaller pool of nominees to see how some of the more similar shows in the pool stack up against each other. Do people think Indiana-based The Middle, a family sitcom based around a couple who manage a quarry and work at a car dealership, is a better show than Modern Family, which features much wealthier families, but also works hard to normalize a gay couple? How do the nerds of The Big Bang Theory stack up against the pop-culture riffers of Community? Something like Louie or Archer doesn’t really exist in the same universe as Glee (though thank goodness both universes can exist simultaneously), and these awards shows are as much a weird way to single out expressions of values as they are to reward artistic merit.